Posted
by
Roblimo
on Thursday May 23, 2013 @03:57PM
from the it's-always-cool-and-calm-up-in-the-clouds dept.

OpenShift, says Wikipedia, "is a cloud computing platform as a service product from Red Hat. A version for private cloud is named OpenShift Enterprise. The software that runs the service is open-sourced under the name OpenShift Origin, and is available on GitHub." This is a video interview in which Diane Mueller Explains OpenShift in depth. You may want to watch this OpenStack demo video as well.

Diane:
Hi. I am Diane Mueller also known as @pythondj on Twitter and I am
the Red Hat Cloud Ecosystem evangelist which is a big title of
nothing. I am actually working on the OpenShift Origin open source
project which is a Platform-as-a-Service, which is now hosted on
OpenShift Online and available as OpenShift Enterprise. But the
project that is near and dear to my heart is the open source project
and that is what we are here at LinuxFest talking about Origin
upstream feeds the Red Hat offerings.

And
Origin is a Platform-as-a-Service. If you don’t know what a
Platform-as-a-Service, maybe I should step back and say what that is
too. If you’ve ever deployed a website or an application to
the cloud, you probably use Amazon or Rackspace or Dreamhost or one
of those many pieces and then you build the stackup of everything
that your application needed like maybe MySQL, Drupal, some plugins
for Drupal, and your content, you know, all of that stuff, and you
had to build that stack for yourself on that hosting service.

And
with the advent of cloud computing, that got a little bit cheaper and
easier because it was more elastic but you still had to build that
stack. Well, then, about two, maybe three years ago, some public
PaaS, or PAAS, Paas, however you want to do it, the acronym is
P-A-A-S, or Platform-as-a-Service, there are lots of ‘as-a’
services but this particular one, what it did was automate the
building of those application stacks.

So
say I have a Jangle app and I use it to install Python for Jangle
packages, I need Postgres, I need Nginx and all of those things.
What it does is it deploys all of that into a secure space on an
instance on the cloud and automates all of that being connected to
your application. So I may build I do a Bottle or a Flask
application (which are two Python frameworks) it will pull the Bottle
Flask framework, it will set up the database I need underneath and
automate all of the deployment.

But
it is much more than just deploying. It is about the deployment, the
administration, and the management of that application as well and
the scaling of it. So Platform-as-a-Service is kind of, in our terms
at OpenShift, we have what’s called a broker and nodes. And
the broker is sort of, think of it as the cloud controller. It is
watching all the nodes and so there are lots of people, it’s a
multitenant world, so your application you deploy on one of those
nodes and you are sharing it actually with lots of other people.
That’s what starts to compress the number of resources you need
to spin up, because in the old days, you’d spin up maybe a
small instance on AWS and your credit card would get zinged to that.

But
now you go to a Platform-as-a-Service and we can do some resource
management and so it gets cheaper and cheaper. And that’s what
the public PAASes did so a public PAAS provider like Heroku, or
Dotcom or Engine Yard or even Google App Engine, they all are sort of
middlemen that have deployed PaaS software on to cloud, AWS, HP Cloud
or whoever it is, and they are doing this service for you.

Now
that’s all going good, and they help drive the adoption of PaaS
right up, and they did some, lots of great open source projects came
out of that, of the pieces and parts, but what we are doing at Red
Hat is we’ve actually taken it to the next generation, and
we’ve open sourced everything under the hood. And we call it
Origin. It is OpenShift Origin. You can find it at
openshift.github.io. All of the source code that you need to deploy
your own PaaS is there - it is really cool.The ethos at Red Hat is
‘anything we build, we are going to make it open’, right?
We really are very strongly committed to that.

And
so all of the pieces and parts you need to deploy your own private
PaaS whether it is on premise, behind your enterprise firewall or you
want to host your own for some niche specific purpose or your own
private minecraft servers or quake you can do that on AWS, and you
don’t have to have that middleman any more. And the reason I
call it the next generation of Platform-as-a-Service is
Platform-as-a-Service as a concept has been around for (I don’t
know) for four or five years, and Sirocco launched and all these
things, and NIST, the national standards for it defines cloud like a
layer cake.

At
the bottom layer is IaaS, or Infrastructure-as-a-Service which you
will hear things like open source projects like OpenStack or
CloudStack is the software that will run and manage all the machines
and spin up an instance on that machine. So that’s the bottom
layer. The next layer up is what we call (you might have in the old
days called it middle web) but we call that the Platform-as-a-Service
one that helps deploy your application.

So
IaaS is about deploying and spinning up machines elastically.
Platform-as-a-Service is about spinning up your application and
scaling that elastically. And the applications on top of that, you
might have heard of another acronym called SaaS or
software-as-a-service, and the famous one Salesforce.com, they bought
Heroku, so that’s a big example of one, but there are lots of
little examples of them too. And you can come to OpenShift.com and
host your own there too.

One
of the other things we are doing here, is if you come to
OpenShift.com you can actually use Origin in its public facing
version which is hosted at OpenShift.com, and sign up and launch and
try out using PaaS for free for three years which is basically enough
to do three small web applications or you can combine it to make
something that is a little bit bigger and more robust. So the idea
behind Platform-as-a-Service is, in our concept, as I mentioned
before, the broker layer, that is an instance that is running that is
managing all the nodes that are underneath it.

And
the nodes are where you can have districts of nodes too, so there are
lots of new terminologies, (we’ll show some slides afterwards,
and you can edit, and you can see what the diagram looks like) but on
those nodes that’s where your application runs. And the broker
and the Platform-as-a-Service software is what’s managing
scaling up and scaling down. So say, you’ve launched a
Wordpress site, and you used just x from underneath and there are no
big hits on hit.

So
your resources are going to go down. We may have the potential to
allocate up if say, you write a very interesting blog post and it
goes boom! And everybody in the universe will scale that application
up for you. But on the other hand, if you are doing something like a
Python financial application or using ARPI and doing some weird
number crunching, trying to figure out the stock market or something
for instance, you can have your application lying fallow and not
using much, and then when you use it for the two or three or four
hours that you need, it will scale up, do the number crunching, and
then scale back down.

And
so it is all about resource sharing. And that is really a cool
thing. And that’s what cloud computing, or elastic computing
is all about. And Platform-as-a-Service makes that really easy to do
for your application. Now the thing you might wonder is in a
multitenant world like that, this is why I say (points to her
T-shirt) “I’ve got 99 problems but SE Linux is not one of
them”, Security, you think about multitenant, you think about
‘is there a good enough firewall between everybody on that same
instance?’

And
that’s one of the things that Platform-as-a-Service does,
especially OpenShift Origin does very very well as we are using SE
Linux so the resources and the labeling is all in there, very
securely keeping people from jumping across walls, or getting access
to things that they shouldn’t. It is all very securely
containerized, so the coders are set, and the resources are set, and
all managed by the PaaS itself, so if I can’t consume all the
resources, I can’t be a greedy guy, there are coders and
business rules that we set up.

And
you can’t go past your allocations – it is a really cool
universe. And what I always like to say is: I am a bad developer,
so if you see me check something in, check it twice in GitHub. But I
gave up on merely doing production quality, dev development that I
would put it out on the web for people to consume, because building
those stacks is hard, and it is versioning, and maintenance, and
patching nightmare. And so I hated that. Like I love coding. I
love Python. And I am beginning to love PHP (I didn’t say that
out aloud) and noJS and all those new languages – they are
great and are lots of fun to play with.

But
I hated building the stacks. And that’s was causes me to trade
for development fun again. Because it is really simple to version,
like if I get to deploy a new version of MySQL without taking my
entire thing down, I can push that change across my application
without it coming down, I can upload patches or the PaaS
administrator if it is a public Paas like OpenShift.com, whoever
controls that, can push new versions of ‘cartridges’
which is a metaphor that we use for plug in methodology.

A
cartridge, you can have a cartridge for say, Mungo or MySQL or PHP; I
have one for Drupal 7 now. And you can push a new cartridge without
affecting everything on it, it is a very easy metaphor for patching
and maintaining. So I always say it makes deployment easy, makes
administration simple, and compliant. And it makes managing. So it
is like a damn’ good thing.

Tim:
I want to ask you one thing about the business model which is, one
of the things that people have always complained on the outside about
open source is it’s hard to sell, hard to make money with open
source software, now at the level of hosting you are offering some
free services, but at the same time, ____9:55
somewhere, so what is your business model in terms of do businesses
subscribe for a month today.

Diane:
It is a very very good question. Right now, Red Hat being the open
source lovers that we are, and we are hosting this free tier in some
ways so we get all the bug fixes and we learn about making sure that
it is scales and get all that feedback into it. But we do like to
make money. I think we made $1.3 billion last year, so it is not
like we don’t make money. And so the three years that you get
for free is enough to really get a decent application running but it
is not going to scale you to the sky.

And
I think, next week the pricing tier is being announced, if you want
to go and scale huge systems and create your own SalesForce.com, we
can host that and service that kind of thing as well. But our
business model is an interesting one, I think. One, because (and
this is my humble opinion,) Origin and its architecture, and this
again why I call it the next generation PaaS, has done some really
interesting things in terms of resource management and being able to
get a whole lot more, it is the MBase Platform-as-a-Service, many of
them are, but we’ve done a lot especially because we are using
SE Linux.

Being
able to manage the number of resources and get more applications and
more users on an instance than any other PaaS on the planet. So we
are really we’ve been concentrating on making sure it
is the most cost effective PaaS to run. And that it is the most
secure. So while other PAASes public PAASes have to charge
_____11:33 bucks, we
will probably charge some place in the same range, but we are
probably doing a better high volume low cost ratio at Red Hat than
any other Platform-as-a-Service on the planet.

So
I believe that when we monetize OpenShift online we will probably be
the more profitable of the ones. But at Red Hat it is not really
about having the most successful public PaaS on the planet, like
that’s not where our revenue stream is coming from, our revenue
stream is for people who want to develop on-premise, firewalled
private platforms within their enterprises.

So
big government agencies, Fortune 500’s, all those kinds of
folks are actually some of them if you look into the
contributors list to Origin they are already there, they are already
contributing to Origin, because they trust Red Hat, they trust our
certification programs, they trust,they want to run it on RHEL, and I
should say also OpenShift runs on RHEL, it runs on Fedora and also on
Centos as well. And we are always looking to do improvements.

So
my pitch to everybody out there in Slashdot-land is that if you want
to get involved and you want to start working in building the next
generation of Platform-as-a-Service come to openshift.github.io. If
you want to build the next generation of cloud, start talking to us
now because what we are doing at Red Hat is really interesting.
Because not only do we have this PaaS layer that I am deeply involved
with but I am also deeply involved in the OpenStack community as
well.

And
so what I am seeing is this convergence of those two layers. So some
people will still be pushing out PaaS software and things like that,
proprietary, sort of open source stuff, all kinds of that, but I
really truly believe that when you build a private cloud, if you
build it with say, OpenStack, that it ought to come just with a PaaS
embedded into it.

And
to that end we’ve been doing a lot of work with the OpenStack
community and the Heat community (which is a service for
orchestrating that is now out in the OpenStack community, I think the
official release will be in Havana, but you can play with it in
Grizzly), and so Heat basically lets you do an orchestration template
and we built one for OpenShift to deploy like that on OpenStack. And
we were demoing it last week, or the week before last at the
OpenStack Summit (now I will give you a URL I can’t remember
the YouTube URL off the top off my head, but that will be under my
comparison).

Tim:
What about people who are currently using other providers, is there
a migration path?

Diane:
It is so simple, to migrate your applications like this weekend while
I am here at this conference in the background I have been migrating
my Drupal 6.26 website to Drupal 7 on my old Dreamhost server, and
then I am going to export it and just install Drupal 7 on
OpenShift.com, import my database, import my content, there are a few
other tweaks look for blog posts shortly, because everything
I do I end up having to write about. But it is so simple to do it.
And right now, I no longer have to pay, sorry Dreamhost, my fee at
Dreamhost because I am hosting it for free, because it is just a
simple Drupal site, and it is so dead easy. I am not going to say it
is so dead easy your dad could do it, but maybe my mom.

Services like EC2 provide you with Linux OS instances (among other things). If it suddenly becomes more expensive to use AWS that it is to stand up a data center, we'll stand up a data center... with Linux boxes. It's not like people will stop making servers, all these hosting businesses actually have to use the same hardware I would.

The data security issue is a little more on-point, but decentralized maintenance of data creates uneven results that are more likely to tend towards the insecure end. While Amazon or RedHat could hire morons to maintain your data, so can anyone else, and your local morons are more likely to be unchecked and unsupported by people who do know what they are doing.

These businesses will not toss your data if you are paying for them to maintain your data. Yes, free Google products might, but that's because they're... well... free. The paid stuff doesn't just delete your data at will. And they don't have to, because you're paying to keep it up.

Services like EC2 provide you with Linux OS instances (among other things). If it suddenly becomes more expensive to use AWS that it is to stand up a data center, we'll stand up a data center... with Linux boxes. It's not like people will stop making servers, all these hosting businesses actually have to use the same hardware I would.

EC2, OpenStack, GCE etc are infrastructure as a service (IaaS) providers. They provide you with just a VM and its up to you to install your own stack on top of it. OpenShift is a platform as a service (PaaS) which already has various software stacks ready to go. You just choose the language/databases etc you need and start working on code.

There are 3 different variants of OpenShift. Online is the one Red Hat runs. But you can take Origin (open-source) or Enterprise and

So develop your services using popular open frameworks that can easily be moved. Unless you are an idiot, you are already set up to move quickly as part of your business continuity / disaster recovery system.

Did you RTFA? Of course not. The whole point of OpenShift is that you can run the whole thing yourself, and anybody can host it, and if the vendor won't add features you desperately want, you can fork it and add them yourself. So if you don't like what Red Hat does with OpenShift, you can run it yourself, free, on Amazon cloud, Rackspace cloud, Oracle cloud, even Windows Azure or Google Compute, or your own private servers.

OpenShift, CloudFoundry, Tsuru, and other open source top-to-bottom Platform-a

I consider PaaS more of a foothold to deploy an application until you can scale large enough to deploy your own infrastructure. It removes the barrier to entry for a lot of people and let's you just start building your application. If it's successful, no problem, deploy your own hardware and your own stack and migrate off. I don't see the problem.

OpenShift, based on OpenStack, is Red Hat's infrastructure for private cloud computing based on the paradigm as Platform as a Service (PaaS). Unlike some competing offering's OpenShift is based on scalable open source technologies....